Everybody knows someone who’s been impacted by cancer at some point in their life. 

The range of feelings that come alongside that journey will be put into symphonic form in Saskatoon this Saturday during a piece by Calgary composer, Vincent Ho. 

The work, called From Darkness to Light: A Spiritual Journey, was inspired by his late friend’s cancer diagnosis nearly ten years ago, but it was propelled by copious amounts of research on the disease and interviews with about a dozen people who had been affected either directly or indirectly. 

“The process is for me to understand the research enough to see the humanity behind it,” Ho explains. “From those shared stories, there were a lot of commonalities with what they experienced, and that’s what I wanted to capture in symphonic form.” 

Ho explains that the music follows the rollercoaster of emotions that comes with cancer diagnosis, starting with fear and anger, and eventually progressing into hope and acceptance. The piece is being performed as part of a larger production by the Saskatoon Symphony Orchestra called The Space Between. 

He will be joined on stage by Dame Evelyn Glennie, who, despite being deaf, is the only person in history to sustain a full-time career as a solo percussionist.  

“She manipulates sound and sonic colours in ways that changes our consciousness and how we relate to the world…There’s so much more to sound that most of us in the hearing world can understand.” 

This will be her first time in Saskatoon. 

“It’s also a concert that celebrates my fiftieth and her sixtieth birthday season, and so this may be the one and only opportunity that people here in Saskatoon will get a chance to hear her perform live with the orchestra,” Ho shared.

The show is at TCU at 7:30. Tickets are available at SaskatoonSymphony.org.